A Bit of Earth

by Rebecca Smith

  One of the presents was a kit for making a dinosaur skeleton out of wood. His dad said that they would do it later, or another day. Felix was bored of always waiting. He pressed the pieces out all by himself. The trouble was that some of them had splinters, and then he couldn’t see how they all went together. He tried to build it, but it didn’t look much like a brachiosaurus. He thought that his dad might be cross that he hadn’t waited. He smashed it up and hid the bits in a bag under his bed. He had a go at drawing a brachiosaurus instead, but it kept going wrong. He tried out all the new pens, and then left their tops off to see if his dad noticed. He drew tiny pictures on the wall beside his bed. Dad didn’t even notice that either. The next day he put all the lids back on the pens because he didn’t really want them to run out. He watched videos. Dad didn’t mind if he watched them again and again.

  Guy tried to talk sense to himself. Terrible, stupid, random things happened. And one had happened to them. If Felix had been the one to die then at least Susannah and he could have swiftly killed themselves. Everything hung by a thread, all life, all happiness.

  Sometimes the thoughts bored him, but he could not stop them. He wondered whether anyone had ever managed any original thoughts when something like this happened to them.

  The world was full of stupid random events.

  He remembered a friend of Jenny’s who broke her neck when she slipped on a pencil, and a case he saw in the paper of some poor soul being accidentally electrocuted in a metal-walled public loo on a seaside promenade.

  Think of history, the untimely demise of so many kings and queens in so many ridiculous ways, to say nothing of all the millions of ordinary, undocumented people. Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap. Everything was an accident. One big cosmic accident. These sorts of things were to be expected. They fitted. In this universe, the nonsensical and the random were to be expected. They should not even be remarked upon.

  Guy hadn’t seen the piece on South Today. Somehow he was aware that there had been articles about the crash in the local paper, but he didn’t read them, and would never have deliberately kept them. Worst of all for Guy, there was an article in the university’s own glossy publication. A short account of what happened, then a long glowing obituary of Julius East. It seemed that he was a professor in his prime, with a long list of publications and contributions to text books and journals. There was a short piece about Susannah who, the reader was left to surmise, had just a minor part in the tragedy; after all she had only been a part-time university library assistant, and had no publications at all to her name. She was only an MA. And wife of Professor Guy Misselthwaite, Department of Botany. It added that she had left a four-year-old son. The publication extended its sincerest condolences to both of the families involved.

  Ah, the families involved. Perhaps there was somebody who could tell Guy something. Perhaps East had had a brother, a confidant, or a sister who gave him advice or admonished him on his affairs. Or maybe the brother had a wife, the indulgent sister-in-law who would know all the secrets. He imagined these Easts sitting outside at some riverside pub, discussing things. There must be somebody who knew and could tell him the truth. Whatever they were like, however appalling, he would have to ask if they had known anything.

  Guy rang Personnel.

  ‘Yes, Professor Misselthwaite. I do understand that these are special circumstances, but I really cannot release the personal details of one, albeit late, member of staff to another.’

  ‘My wife was a member of your staff too. I’m only trying to … I want to express my, you know, share our troubles …’

  ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Professor Misselthwaite. I really am. Susannah was a lovely person.’

  Guy ground his teeth. Then help me! he felt like screaming. Instead he picked at something, probably mud, that was engrained in the fabric of his trousers.

  ‘Well, how about you get in touch with his next of kin, and ask if you can give me their phone number?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I’d be very happy to do that for you. I’ll call you back, whatever their answer is.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Guy. ‘Thank you.’

  Felix was at nursery. There was stuff that Guy should have been doing in the lab. There were reports that he should have been writing.

  Guy should have gone shopping, or tidied or hoovered. He should have been sorting out more of Susannah’s things. Felix’s room was in the state that Susannah had called ‘a sty of pigs’. Guy went in, thinking that he might at least pick up the animals and put the books back in the bookcase. The house was in chaos. Everything was always lost now. Susannah had been so good at finding things. She had always known where everything was. He lay down on Felix’s bed and stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, which by day were a nasty shade of ivory. Suddenly it was time to go and fetch Felix back.

  The woman on the door at the nursery asked him if he would ‘stay behind for a chat’. Felix was sitting meekly on the carpet holding Marmalade. It took an age for the other children and their parents to leave. Why on earth did they want to spend so long standing around chatting and looking at the unidentifiable things that their offspring had made? Eventually one of the nursery women gestured for him to sit down in a miniature chair. She was not the oldest, but her green sweatshirt was the most faded. Guy decided that this must betoken rank and experience.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mr Misselthwaite?’

  ‘Guy,’ he said. ‘No thanks.’ He imagined it would be served in a tiny cup from the scratched red plastic tea-set that another of the women was busy stowing in a crate with some imitation fruit and vegetables.

  ‘We just wanted to ask how you are.’

  ‘Fine,’ Guy almost barked back.

  ‘And just let you know how Felix has been doing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Guy. ‘I am grateful that he’s still been coming.’

  ‘Of course he has been very quiet, but then he always was very quiet. He’s been taking his toy cat round to any of the activities he does. And he often seems very tired.’

  ‘Well, neither of us is sleeping that well,’ Guy said. He stared down at the table, not wanting to say that Felix woke up in the night sometimes and cried, and that if he didn’t get there quickly enough the crying got more eerie, and then louder because Felix had frightened himself. Or that three times now Felix had wandered around asleep, looking and looking in all of the rooms. He had seemed to want to go up and down the hall again and again as though it were a long corridor. Guy hadn’t been sure what to do the first time, but then he realised that he should just guide Felix back to bed and tuck him in again, and wait and wait until Felix was properly settled.

  ‘It must be very hard for both of you,’ she went on. ‘Also, he does seem to avoid doing the worksheets, but of course we haven’t been pushing him. Plenty of time for all that at school. We’ve got some for you here, these are ones he’s missed.’

  She pushed the folder across the table towards Guy. He opened it and flicked through. He tried very hard to focus, and to put all thoughts but those of the present, those of this very moment, out of his mind.

  Give these six mice a tail. What, he thought, one to share? He pinched himself in the thigh, fearing that he was about to give a great honk, like some big crazy goose, or start guffawing. Cut out the washing and stick it on the line. The idea here was to put things in numerical order. Billie is five. Draw some candles on the cake. Did they know that Felix could read? Draw a ring round the things that begin with ‘M’. What else can you think of that begins with ‘M’?

  ‘Sometimes he’s been a bit tearful, and he was once very vocal to Diane about the bikes and trikes. We just took him aside until he calmed down. He doesn’t seem to want to join in with any imaginary play at the moment either. He is quite withdrawn from the other children.’

  ‘I suppose that’s all to be expected,’ said Guy.

  ‘There was one incident today, he hid another child’s toy
, Milo from the Tweenies, in the sandpit. That’s partly why we wanted to have a little chat.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Guy. It was a terrible image. He tried to blink it away. ‘Well, we’d better be going. Come on, Felix.’

  ‘Well …’ She seemed about to say some more. Guy got up. Felix had disappeared.

  ‘He’s in the outdoor area. He does like digging in our cocoa shells tray. Probably the smell.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Guy. Outside Felix was pushing a tiny fire engine through a landscape of cocoa chips in a raised sandpit-type tray. ‘Time to go, Felix. You’ll be coming back tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t forget the worksheets!’ the leader called after them, but they seemed not to hear. She stowed the folder in the cupboard. Perhaps she should find out who the Misselthwaites’ health visitor was and have a chat with her. Perhaps what she should have been giving Guy was a Lexicon of Pre-School Ladies’ Words and Phrases.

  A little chat – something appalling to bring to your attention.

  A bit tearful – sobs uncontrollably.

  Very quiet – miserable/friendless.

  Quite withdrawn – catatonic.

  Very vocal – crazy with anger.

  Stephanie from Personnel rang back whilst he was making some scrambled eggs for tea. Professor East’s mother would not mind him telephoning her. He wrote down the number (it was a local one), gave all the eggs to Felix, and set him to eat them in front of Art Attack..

  The phone rang and rang. He was about to hang up when she answered.

  ‘Mrs East?’

  ‘Yes?’ It was a quavering voice, grief-stricken, he supposed, or a very old lady, considering the time she’d taken to get to the phone.

  ‘Mrs East. My name is Professor Guy Misselthwaite. My wife was in the car, in the accident, with your son. I am sorry you lost your son. I’m sure you know that my wife died too.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Silence.

  ‘Well,’ Guy ploughed on, ‘as I said, I’m very sorry about your son. And I wondered if I might come and see you. I think we should meet. There are some …’

  ‘If this is about insurance …’

  ‘No, no,’ said Guy, ‘it’s nothing to do with that at all. I just wanted, thought that we should meet, pay my respects …’

  ‘That would be all right. I’m in most of the time. But my brother-in-law, he’s been very good, sorting things out, he said, but if it isn’t about any insurance …’

  ‘Really, it’s not. It’s, well, our families are linked now, and I just wanted to … It’s a very difficult time, isn’t it? Could I have your address?’

  ‘It’s Flat 26, Greenacres, Market Street.’

  ‘Oh, I know where that is.’

  ‘Julius bought it for me. He was a good son to me.’

  ‘I’ll come tomorrow morning if that’s all right. Maybe about ten.’

  Tomorrow came. Guy dropped Felix off at nursery and managed to avoid any conversation with the woman in charge. He drove to the supermarket for milk, bread and cereal. He abandoned his place in a checkout queue to go back for some flowers. The late summer flowers had arrived. He didn’t want gladioli. For once chrysanthemums seemed appropriate, white ones. How unpleasant they smelled. They promised a vase life of at least two weeks. He decided to take a bunch of yellow button ones too. As he queued up again he noticed that their sell-by date was even longer than that of the white ones.

  He had once loved sell-by dates. As a boy he’d felt a shiver of excitement at the appearance of any sell-by date that reached beyond his birthday or Christmas. You could ignore the ones on things that lasted practically for ever, but when it was some sort of medium-length-life thing, say a block of cheese or a tub of margarine, it started to get really interesting.

  ‘Look!’ he’d tell his family. ‘We have to eat this by Boxing Day.’ Or ‘Guess what? We can even eat these ginger nuts on my birthday!’ He had liked the way sell-by dates proved that time was marching on, and that other people were guaranteeing that it would pass. It had pleased him that there was nothing that he could do to stop it. Nowadays, ‘sell by’ was more often ‘use by’, or just ‘exp’, and he was mocked by the dates on packets and tins and tubs and jars in the cupboards at home; all the things that Susannah had bought, but would never use.

  Greenacres in Market Street was easy to find. The market was a pay-and-display car park most of the time. Greenacres looked like a new block of old people’s flats, new flats for old people, new flats for the old and the newly old – Guy couldn’t think how to put it. He pressed the buzzer for Flat 26.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s Professor Misselthwaite,’ he said, ‘I rang you yesterday.’ He thought that the use of ‘Professor’ would help, that it would make her think that he was to be trusted, as presumably she had trusted her own son, or that his visit was in some sort of official capacity, and that she should answer his questions.

  The door was buzzed open. In he went through the lobby, past an empty umbrella stand and some everlasting aspidistras. Weren’t aspidistras unpleasant and depressing enough without being made everlasting? They were protruding from fake brown compost with fake white plastic balls in it. He went up in the lift.

  She was waiting just inside her open front door. She was tiny, must have been less than five foot and, he guessed, in her late seventies. Her hair was exactly the same shade of pale grey as her trousers and sweatshirt. They looked like clothes for being miserable in. He could see no resemblance at all between Julius East and this woman.

  A thick, transparent carpet protector led past a shoe rack that held just one pair of shoes (wide, black lace-ups with a pale blue towelling lining), past the open door of a bathroom, to the sitting room. Here the carpet protector ended, but the same carpet continued, pristine and creamy, and flecked with all the colours of sandwich spread. Guy felt very ill. He needed some coffee.

  ‘Julius bought this flat for me. I used to live in Swansea. My husband was Welsh. But after he died, Julius wanted me nearer. It’s nice for the shops. It’s a pity the market went. It was regular before I moved in. They do have a French one sometimes. He used to come on those days, and if the farmers’ market was on. He’d come then.’ Guy smiled and nodded. ‘There’s no point having a great big sack of something if you’re all by yourself most of the time though, is there? How would I get through a whole carrier bag of rhubarb with the leaves still on?’

  Guy could see into the kitchenette where there was a tiny pedal bin. The poor woman must have filled it and re-filled it with rhubarb leaves. He nodded and tried to smile some more.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘would you like a cup of tea? Or I’ve got some of this special coffee. Julius would never drink instant like other people. He always brought some of this with him. I don’t like it, but we might as well use it up.’

  Let his superior coffee turn to bitter dust in the cupboard.

  ‘I would prefer tea,’ said Guy. ‘Definitely tea.’

  ‘It’s all tea, tea, tea for a while, isn’t it? Everybody giving you tea. And I’ll put these in water.’ She put the chrysanthemums into a cut-glass vase. They were much too tall for it. Guy wondered if that was how she liked them to look, or whether he should trim the stalks for her. They were very woody, and probably too tough for her to manage with her own lignified hands. The wrappings from the flowers filled the pedal bin.

  Guy pretended to look out of the window whilst she made the tea. There was nothing much to look at, just people parking and looking for the best spaces. She had a small balcony with tubs of trailing carnations (mail order, low maintenance, extended flowering period). He went over to a glass-fronted cabinet. Amongst the legions of china animals and dolls in elaborate costumes were framed photographs.

  A family group, 1960s, a seaside holiday. The parents looked old for parents. Here was Julius East, unmistakeable, holding his shrimping net. He looked like a Roman soldier. Beside him a little girl, a younger sister, dumpy in a wrongly buttoned cardigan
over her bathing costume. She was eating an ice cream, but looked sulky. A barrette failed to keep her hair from blowing into her eyes, and probably into the ice cream. Had Julius already finished his? Did he forgo them? Perhaps the flavours available on Welsh beaches in the 1960s weren’t to his liking. And here he was in a graduation shot, his hair all slicked back. He looked like a young Tory politician, self-basting.

  Now Mrs East was coming back with the tray.

  ‘It’s an unusual name, Julius. He grew up in Swansea?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It must have been a very unusual name there, back then.’

  A saucer rattled against the milk bottle as she put the tray down.

  ‘Oh, he came to us with it, he was adopted, you see. It didn’t seem right to change it. It was all he had. We’d given up hoping for any of our own. It was often the way. But then along came Jenny.’

  ‘I have a sister called Jenny too. Your Jenny, she must have been devastated, I mean about the accident.’

  ‘Well, they’ve never been that close, and she’s very busy with her career. She’s a hospital administrator, and not even married. No grandchildren for me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘She lives in Reading. They said it’s not that far if you can drive, but I can’t. Now I wish I’d stayed in Swansea. At least I knew people there. And I had my own garden. All I’ve got here is my balcony…’

  ‘I’ve seen. Those are nice Alpine carnations.’

  ‘Thank you. Here’s your tea.’

  ‘My sister used to collect those little china animals. They had a name …’

  ‘Whimsies.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Whimsies.’ Guy sipped his milky tea. ‘Mrs East, my wife was in the car with your son, in the accident. She died too.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss too.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Guy stirred his tea, even though he didn’t take sugar. ‘Mrs East, did your son ever talk about my wife? Her name was Susannah. Susannah Misselthwaite. She worked in the university library. You see, I’m trying to find out. I don’t even know why she was with him in the car. I don’t know …’